There has been great interest in providing Internet access at minimal economic cost. While most computers now are pre-configured for Internet access, a significant percentage of households still do not have a personal computer. Thus, it has now been proposed to provide a data processing system that, much like a VCR, may be connected to a television set and used in lieu of a personal computer to provide Web access through a conventional remote control device associated with the to system unit. Such a system enables the television to become, in effect, a "Web" appliance. The viewer can rapidly switch between conventional television and Internet access using the remote control unit.
All of the conventional "Internet" access tools and navigational functions are preferably "built-in" to the system and thus hidden to the user. One such tool is a browser, which is used to provide the user access to the Internet's multimedia information retrieval system, commonly referred to as the World Wide Web. Access to the Web is provided using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Typically, a browser issues HTTP GET requests to servers in the World Wide Web by passing packets over the network and receiving Web documents.
The Web appliance will likely be connected to the Internet via a dialup computer network. The network and, in particular, the Internet service provider (or ISP), may assign an Internet Protocol (IP) address each time the Internet client dials up to the network. This IP address is used by a sockets mechanism to enable the browser to communicate with the network or, alternatively, to a proxy server supported in the client. Client side proxy server support has many advantages, as described in copending application Ser. No. 08/808,287 filed concurrently herewith. During a particular session, however, the connection to the dialup network may be broken, e.g., because the client is inactive for a period of time or the physical connection is disrupted for some reason. In the dialup environment, the IP address assigned by the ISP may change every time a new modem connection is established. When this IP address changes, the browser has to reconfigure itself if the connection to the local proxy server is to be properly maintained. If the browser cannot be configured, then it must be restarted in order to pass connection requests to the proxy server. Restarting a Web appliance, however, is very undesirable.
Thus, there is a need to enhance an existing sockets mechanism so that bind requests to stale IP addresses are redirected to a current IP address as modem connections are continuously broken and reestablished during a session.